Maker’s Mark

by Phyllis Cole-Dai

Maker’s Mark by Phyllis Cole-Dai

	     in tribute to Franciszek Kempa, Polish Jew, master luthier,
	     maker of the only stringed instrument known to have
	     been built in the Dachau concentration camp (1941)

When you have lost all hope,
you must learn to make hope,
to save yourself dying from despair.

Behind barbed wire in this place of death,
without proper wood or tools of the trade,
you must make a violin, or perish.

Making violins has been your life,
and hope must be fashioned from the givens,
even if it will please a nazi. So, you set your jaw,

take up a rusty saw, this orphaned scrap
of wood, and begin a godless season of cutting, 
carving, joining, staining, polishing . . .

May you live to string the pegs. To tune
the strings by ear, defying the deafness of heaven.
To hide a maker’s mark inside the body, out of easy view,

a secret message to a future you may never see 
but in whose goodness you’re so desperate to believe
you must build the best violin you can, even for a brute.

Your handwritten who and where and when will serve as proof:
You were here. You saw and suffered unspeakable horror. 
Still, you strove for beauty, and regretted falling short:

     Trial instrument, 
     made under difficult conditions
     with no tools or materials.

If someday someone stumbles across this crude
box with strings, may they forgive what you couldn’t do.
To be a master maker, you must master hope,

hear the vibrato before shaping the bow.
Every piece of wood has the right to sing.
It is you who must open the mouth.



From Phyllis Cole-Dai:

When we “make,” we bring something new into existence from the old. This involves our imagining or intuiting what isn’t already here while working to help it emerge. As such, creative practices are expressions of hope.

Perhaps we might also say that hope itself is a creative practice.

If Franciszek Kempa could make hope in the hell of Dachau, what expressions of hope might you and I be capable of making, in whatever circumstances we now find ourselves?



For further commentary and historical perspective, go to:

☀️ Staying Power #192: "Maker's Mark"
an original poem-in-progress
PHYLLIS COLE-DAI
JUN 22, 2025